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Nouveau Can Do OpenCL Compute For Open-Source NVIDIA

02-06-2012, 10:00 PM

Phoronix: Nouveau Can Do OpenCL Compute For Open-Source NVIDIA

There's another big accomplishment within the open-source graphics camp: Nouveau developers now having an initial working OpenCL implementation for NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware on the driver that the Linux community developed themselves via reverse-engineering without NVIDIA's support...

Why do so many of these articles include comments like "unfortunately this experimental and unfinished work isn't in the mainline tree" - feature branches exist for good reason, we don't want stuff like this in mainline until it is ready.

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Why do so many of these articles include comments like "unfortunately this experimental and unfinished work isn't in the mainline tree" - feature branches exist for good reason, we don't want stuff like this in mainline until it is ready.

Even worse, Michael will as usual pull an experimental branch, run PTS (<-so far so helpful), and then write a negative article complaining that it's buggy and unstable. And that there is no support for Kepler yet.

And to add insult to injury, later link that article in the next negative one with 'the nouveau developers have other significant problems to worry about'. It's really aggravating, especially in the case of nouveau.

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The word you're looking for is schizophrenic. It's only a matter of time before Michael completely backtracks on all the good stuff in this article when telling us how slow / buggy the new experimental code is and how it doesn't work on a Geforce 2 card or something similar. Then of course he'll run something using the new experimental reclocking feature (hidden behind a kernel boot flag because it really isn't ready yet) and complain that it's faster but causes problems

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The word you're looking for is schizophrenic. It's only a matter of time before Michael completely backtracks on all the good stuff in this article when telling us how slow / buggy the new experimental code is and how it doesn't work on a Geforce 2 card or something similar. Then of course he'll run something using the new experimental reclocking feature (hidden behind a kernel boot flag because it really isn't ready yet) and complain that it's faster but causes problems

Hey, this is Michael?s "house", would you show some respect?!

I see no connectivities between his approach, where Glisse correctly said this stuff is not in mainline for a reason, and you accusing him for being schizophrenic. Shizophrenics have divided personality - where is it?
Phoronix is focused on newest technologies around opensource and graphics, I see nothing wrong in what he is doing!! He is doing it very good and no one is perfect.

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Agreed. With the re-clocking work and now OpenCL, there might be a day sometime soon that I can move my Macbook's Ubuntu install to nouveau instead of the blob. Currently, my battery life and desire/need to write OpenCL code prevent that from happening.

That said, my main desktops (all 3) are running AMD CPUs with Radeon GPUs (HD3200, 6850, and a Llano), so I'm REALLY looking forward to when I can use Mesa + OpenCL, because Gnome Shell and Catalyst still don't get along.

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I don't see why the divided personalities have to be necessarily between calm and angry, or some such. Besides, at least according to wikipedia, those who have Schizophrenia have problems discerning reality (delusions), and other thought disorders. They don't (necessarily) have a "split personality" disorder.

Of course, that doesn't make the suggestion that Michael has Schizophrenia or any sort of personality disorder, as a joke or otherwise, any more tasteful.

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I wonder if Nouveau is capable of un-crippling the double precision performance cap imposed by the binary driver on GeForce cards. Or is that in the firmware? Normally, only normal precision runs at full speed. DP is capped to 1/8th, unless you buy a Tesla or Quadro.

If this is indeed possible, then Linux (through Nouveau) is going to be a very Big Thing for everyone seeking high GPGPU performance on cheap hardware.